When I was 10 years old I was learning to play on a $15 acoustic guitar and couldn't afford an electric to play all the Jimmy Page licks I was so desperate to emulate. I had mounted an old telephone mic in the sound hole and was cutting out a cutaway with a jig saw when my father walked in having a minor fit. I never did get that guitar back to playing shape but it did force me to get a paper route which led to my first co-signed bank loan, which led to my first electric guitar, the coveted Fender Telecaster that was sitting in the window of of Wadell's Music on Pembina Hwy for months for the unbelievably unattainable price of $199. I had the guitar, but no amplifier, but in the basement there was an old Marconi console stereo inherited from my grandfather that no one laid claim to & I proceeded to raid it for speakers and 10 watt tube amplifier which I mounted into an old Supro box and presto, I had a fake Supro just like my Led Zep hero. By the time I was twelve I was making my first multi track recordings by using 2 mono reel to reel recorders. I would playback the first track while recording a new one and bouncing the old track at the same time, later syncing the 2 by using a pencil to lock down the capstan motor. No one had told me you could buy an actual machine that could do this with 4 or even 8 tracks!

So along the way I kinda grew up carrying this odd combination of tooling around with electronics with a left brain aspiration to be an artist myself, spending most of my teens into my late 20's playing with a bunch of different local Winnipeg bands, Dash & the Dots, The Cheer, and Rustle the Fish. I started off as a guitar player but, in order, I learned to play piano & organ, cello, upright bass, mandolin, banjo & with my first Roland MC 500 I started on my long journey as a music programmer.

I started my Recording career somewhere in the middle of those 10 or so lost years of draggin my butt across the continent as a working musician. I got pretty good as a player & don't regret that period in the least but I soon wanted 2 things-some way to make a living doing what I loved and a way to make my own recordings in a way that wasn't going to bankrupt me. I fell into it by osmosis, without having a clue I just started recording anybody and everybody I could. I started on an old Tascam 8 track and graduated to a 16 track on half inch tape. I was in heaven, I got my first job at Sunshine Studios covering for a buddy who was too hung over to make his 9am Saturday morning session. Over the next few years I worked at every studio I could, Trillium, Greg Leskews, CBC, Channels, and assisted on any gig I could whenever there was a better engineer than me involved. I was coming out of 4 years of playing with the Cheer and we had recorded Shot With Our Own Guns at the infamous Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver with our punk rock pals Bob Rock & Paul Hyde from the Payola's and I got my first taste of recording in a real studio with real guys making real records with Bona Fide Rock Stars in the next studio over! This was also the first time I understood how important the room or environment was, the use of room mics to record the actual room ambience was very apparent at Little Mountain, where they stuck mics out in the loading dock for drum reverb. As important as the sound of the room is the vibe of the environs. It was during this same period I met Brad Roberts at Schmekers Restaurant, I was the short order cook and he the busboy, both of us aspiring rock stars. He would sneak into The Village Inn down Portage Ave. to see my band Dash & the Dots. A few years later his band The St. James Rhythm Pigs had morphed into Crash Test Dummies and I was sneaking them into one of my employers studios in the wee hours to record their first six song demo tape. Long story short, this began a decade long musical relationship with the band, working as an engineer on their first record, which led to building the Dummies God of Thunder Studio's. As the band got famous and moved to London I took the next step of building my first large scale studio Ambience Professional on Erin St in Winnipeg. Six years later and many many albums later I shut down Ambience and headed off to New York to work in the US. My father had passed away and it led to a major change in my life & priorities.

A decade has passed during which I spent much of the time mixing live concerts and in the summertime mixing festivals across Canada. I kept making the odd record and composing film soundtracks out of my modest home studio. I have slowly found my way back to my first love, writing recording & producing music of all kinds. Although many of my clients are singer songwriters that require my abilities to create fully produced tracks for their compositions I enjoy recording bands in the most organic way possible. Gone are the pretentions that one needs a million dollars of gear in a pristine studio that costs hundreds of dollars an hour. One thing the digital revolution has given us is a level playing field, everybody has a ProTools rig, what separates us engineers & producers from the sea of mediocrity is the experience, talent and dedication to the art of recording that has been my motivation from the very beginning. So this my story, it's 2013 & I once again am slowly building a beautiful new recording room in the middle of Winnipeg's Exchange district, where everything feels alive down here. I'm in a heritage building that houses other Composers, Novelists, Film makers, & Visual artists. It's an interesting experiment but an exciting one, I'd like to welcome all comers to share in the experience with me. Lets make a record!